There’s nothing I love quite as much as decorating for the holidays! So when October 1st rolls around I am more than ready to break the boxes out if the basement and enjoy the fall weather!
Here’s my living room this year. My favorite part is my newest sign that says “if you are reading this then you are blissfully unaware of what is creeping up behind you”

I haven’t posted here in forever. A lot has changed, but life’s been busy and it’s hard to keep up sometimes.
The last few months in a nutshell?

The chickens are out (aka something all them all. 4th of July weekend. Yeah.)

The new puppy is in! We brought him home at 8 weeks old on August 2nd. His name is Sullivan but we generally call him Sully. He’s a cavalier King Charles spaniel, and he’s the perfect little fit for our family!

I know you were worried about it, so I thought I’d put your mind at ease. And I don’t have to worry about how to rewrap and ship an 8×11 rug back because it wasn’t what we wanted.

But I do have to say I only have good things to say so far about Rugs USA. I’ve only bought two rugs from them so far, but both are even better in person than I was hoping (which might be a case of low expectations – because really, I’m never 100% convinced anything online is going to look as good as the picture). Continue reading →

Well, actually it’s probably because I tend to take the path of over complication. (I know, I can hear you saying “You? No way!” but it’s true…)

Our new dining room set arrived in October. I half-heartedly started looking pervious to that, but didn’t want to pick anything until I had a better idea about how the set would look in the room. But pretty much since November, every couple of weeks I would spend a few days online looking at rugs and pictures of dining rooms for inspiration.

I actually fell in love with a rug just a few weeks ago. But it wasn’t meant to be. After getting my hopes up, and becoming hopelessly attached to a rug that looked nothing like my original vision… I discovered it only came in a 5×8 size. I needed at least an 8×10, preferably even larger.

Heart crushed, I even considered buying two and trying to attach them. But there’s no way the pattern would have matched up.

So apparently chickens don’t like snow. Or at least our chickens don’t. We do have pretty spoiled chickens though, so that might have something to do with it.

Our chickens refuse to walk on the snow. They’d rather hide out inside the coop, bored to the point of pulling each others feathers out, than go outside.

We might have less than 6 chickens by the time spring rolls around. They’re pulling feathers out of the back of the two smallest chickens necks. Which isn’t good, but the real trouble will start if they keep going and someone ends up bleeding. Apparently chickens get blood lust. Once there’s blood, they’ll all go crazy killing each other.

So to help, we’ve put a plastic ploy tarp over part of the run to keep the snow out. We’ve shoveled out all the snow currently in the run so they can go out. We’ve gotten a protein supplement for their food (I guess sometimes they peck because of a protein deficiency). And Jon got a no-peck cream to put on the two getting picked on’s necks. It also has tea tree oil to help the skin heal.

He put it on the two and one tasted it to check it out, and immediately started shaking her head and rubbing her beak in the dirt – so it should be helpful!

They are only laying maybe one or two eggs a day. And about 2/3 of the time the eggs are frozen when we get them, so our egg stash is pretty depleted. They’re barely producing enough to keep up with Jon’s breakfast routine. I haven’t had this much space in my fridge since they started laying!

Jon’s much less enamored of them now too. They’re a lot more work in the winter than the summer, and we’re getting less from them. It’s also been freaking cold, and who wants to leave the warm house to go deal with chicken poop?

We’ve joked that if we build our next house, we’re going to build a small barn with a built in chicken coop and run, so they can be inside and more protected (and therefore less work) in the winter. All of this definitely reinforces my refusal to have any other farm animals though. And makes me okay with our decision to wait until spring to get a puppy. No way would I want to house break the dog in the snow!